v0.3.0 - 2013-05-01

v0.2.1-beta1 - 2013-01-12

Bonjour support (@jeanregisser)

Memory leak fix (@rwickliffe)

Features

Network Traffic Debugging

PonyDebugger sends your application's network traffic through
ponyd,
PonyDebugger's proxy server. You use Inspector's Network tools to debug network
traffic like how you would debug network traffic on a website in Google Chrome.

PonyDebugger forwards network traffic, and does not sniff network traffic. This
means that traffic sent over a secure protocol (https) is debuggable.

Currently, the iOS client automatically proxies data that is sent via
NSURLConnection and NSURLSession methods. This means that it will
automatically work with AFNetworking, and other libraries that use
NSURLConnection or NSURLSession for network requests.

Core Data Browser

The Core Data browsing feature allows you to register your application's
NSManagedObjectContexts and browse all of its entities and managed objects.
You browse data from the IndexedDB section in the Resource tab in Chrome
Developer Tools.

These are read-only stores at the moment. There are plans to implement data
mutation in a future release.

View Hierarchy Debugging

PonyDebugger displays your application's view hierarchy in the Elements tab of
the Chrome Developer Tools. As you move through the XML tree, the corresponding
views are highlighted in your app. You can edit the displayed attributes (i.e.
frame, alpha, ...) straight from the Elements tab, and you can change which
attributes to display by giving PonyDebugger an array of UIView key paths.
Deleting a node in the elements panel will remove that node from the view
hierarchy. Finally, when a view is highlighted, you can move it or resize it
from the app using pan and pinch gestures.

An "inspect" mode can be entered by clicking on the magnifying glass in the
lower left corner of the Developer Tools window. In this mode, tapping on a view
in the iOS app will select the corresponding node in the elements panel. You can
also hold and drag your finger around to see the different views highlighted.
When you lift your finger, the highlighted view will be selected in the elements
panel.

Currently only a subset of the actions possible from the elements panel have
been implemented. There is significant room for continued work and improvement,
but the current functionality should prove useful nonetheless.

Remote Logging

PonyDebugger lets you remotely log text and object dumps via the PDLog and
PDLogObjects function. This lets you reduce the amount of content being
logged in NSLog, while also allowing you to dynamically introspect objects.

Introspected objects can be expanded recursively by property. This means that
you don't have to breakpoint and log in GDB or LLDB to introspect an object.

Quick Start

Prerequisite: Xcode's Command Line Tools must be installed from the "Downloads"
preference pane.

When using CocoaPods, you must open the .xcworkspace file instead of the
project file when building your project.

Manual Installation

Extract a tarball or zipball of the repository into your project directory.
If you prefer, you may also add the project as a submodule. The iOS client
uses SocketRocket as a dependency,
and it is included as a submodule.

In your Project Settings, add the PonyDebugger target as a Target Dependency
in the Build Phases tab.

Link libPonyDebugger.a, libSocketRocket.a, and the Framework dependencies
to your project.

PonyDebugger and SocketRocket take advantage of Objective C's ability to add
categories on an object, but this isn't enabled for static libraries by
default. To enable this, add the -ObjC flag to the "Other Linker Flags"
build setting.

Framework Dependencies

Your .app must be linked against the following frameworks/dylibs in addition to
libPonyDebugger.a and libSocketRocket.a.

libicucore.dylib

CFNetwork.framework

CoreData.framework

Security.framework

Foundation.framework

Usage

PonyDebugger's main entry points exist in the PDDebugger singleton.

PDDebugger *debugger = [PDDebugger defaultInstance];

To connect automatically to the PonyGateway on your LAN (via Bonjour):

[debugger autoConnect];

Or to open the connection to a specific host, for instance
ws://localhost:9000/device:

PonyDebugger uses KVO to monitor changes in the attributes of all views in the
hierarchy, so the information in the elements panel stays fresh.

Remote Logging

To enable remote logging:

[debugger enableRemoteLogging];

Example usage:

PDLog("Hello world!"); // This logs a simple string to the console output.PDLogObjects(self); // This logs an introspectable version of "self" to the console.PDLogObjects("My object:", object); // Combination of text and introspectable object.

The repository contains a test application to demonstrate PonyDebugger's
capabilities and usage.

Known Issues / Improvements

CoreData.framework must be linked, even if you do not use the Core Data
browsing functionality.

iOS 5.1 and below: In certain cases,
-[NSURLConnectionDataDelegate connection:willSendRequest:redirectResponse:]
will never get called. PonyDebugger requires this call to know when the
request was sent, and will warn you with a workaround that the timestamp is
inaccurate.

To fix the timestamp, make sure that Accept-Encoding HTTP header in your
NSURLRequest is not set (by default, iOS will set it to gzip, deflate,
which is usually adequate.